Gears-enabling Gmail will be great, for those “unconnected” moments (hours), and I certainly hope they will avoid dumb mistakes that made Google Reader almost useless offline.

But for now, all I wish is a little more reliabilty.  Formerly rock-solid Gmail has been ill a lot lately.  The “Oops…the system encountered a problem (#500) – Retrying in 1:30” error message has became a daily occurance… in fact several times a day.

A minute and half is not that much – except that it’s not only waiting for the requested operation, it freezes up Gmail entirely.  So if you’re impatient, you’ll inevitable click the “Retry now” button. After all, that’s whay it’s there, isn’t it?

Wrong!  You’ve just found Gmail’s penalty button!  Every time you click it, the wait counter increases by a minute.

Still want to work, rather than go for coffee?  The only solution is to completely close the browser tab – sometimes the entire browser – then log back into Gmail again.

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Tags: gmail, gmail bugs, Google, google reader, penalty